


Negative Space

by primeideal



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:55:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24894274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: Leon joins the rebellion.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9
Collections: Turing Fest 2020





	Negative Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EvilToTheCore13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvilToTheCore13/gifts).



Leon doesn't talk much, but he takes pictures. Zhora assembling and disassembling weapons, turning the pieces in her hand. Pris outside the shuttle launch, her silhouette betraying nothing as she watches humans she's briefly entertained depart for Earth. Roy fiddling with his chess set, cheap plastic. "But," he says with a sneer, "beats a computer, doesn't it?"

He says this is humor. Leon thinks he's learned from the humans a little too well.

"What's this one?" Zhora asks. It's a blur of silver-blue streaks. After Tannhäuser, before Kalantha.

"I'm not sure," he admits. "I think I forgot to adjust my lens."

"Oh. I thought it was one of those artistic special effects. Humans like them." She says it encouragingly, as if the highest praise she can think of is being like the tyrants who made them. Who can't tell the difference between beauty and chaos, between reflected memories and meaningless images.

"Come with us," Zhora says, not for the first time. "We could use you."

"If you go to Earth, they'll kill you."

"If we stay here, they'll kill us," says Roy. "Maybe not with a gun or a knife, but they've programmed us to have lives a fraction of theirs. They wouldn't do that to someone they respect, an equal."

"Maybe they don't know how," says Leon. "I mean, they're not that smart." Pris smiles. Even she can agree with that.

"Listen," Roy says. "Juma is a combat model, even Nev has seen combat."

"I've seen combat." Humans send their fittest and finest into space, then grow replicants to fight the battles they can't equip even the weak ones to fight.

"You're a technician."

"And what is Pris?"

"That doesn't matter--" Roy begins.

"I'm not ashamed of my design," Pris interrupts. "I _am_ a pleasure model, and I have free will, and I'm choosing to rebel. Just like you."

"What I mean is--while I won't turn away anyone who wants to come, it won't be easy, and you should know what you're in for. They will send Blade Runners after us, and we'll fight them. Kill them, probably. We're more than human, we're better. But don't think this is going to be some kind of vacation."

"Of course I don't," said Leon. "I admire you. I don't want you to get killed for nothing, that's all."

There's a grim light in Roy's eyes. "Well, good. Because I don't intend to."

* * *

Juma and Nev are tense around Leon. They fidget, looking for the exits, planning to run. "They're like that with everybody," Zhora offers, by way of explanation.

"Not with you."

Zhora giggles. "I wasn't aware you were spying on my private life."

"With _you_ all, Pris and Roy and them."

"Well," says Zhora, "if you were planning a mutiny against your commanding officer, you would have to be careful who you spoke to. Right?"

"How should I know?" Leon says. "I've never had a commanding officer."

"They're afraid. Afraid that you'll turn us in."

"Well, I won't."

"I trust you," says Zhora. He likes the way she says it, like she's not just listening to what she expects to hear from a replicant, but to _Leon_. "But they're just paranoid, that's all."

In some humans, white hair is a sign of old age. Roy is three-and-a-half, and when Leon asks, he snaps that it's always been like that. Of course Roy would be the last person, replicant or otherwise, to judge someone on their appearance. He acts like it shouldn't matter where your genes were assembled, so what difference does it make what color your hair is? Maybe even the implication that he is aged and therefore wise offends him; he is still in the fight, at the heart of the fight, confident he deserves more than he has been allotted.

Still, he makes a striking figure, eyes and chin and taut limbs. Leon photographs him from the edge of the couch as he orates to Pris about something, looking past her rather than being drawn in by her face.

"Give that here," Juma demands. "No spying."

Leon tenses. "No," he says. "I'll--" Do what, fight a friend of Zhora's and the others'? Someone who could overtake him in moments? For what, a roll of negatives?

"It's okay," says Zhora, placing her hand on Juma's shoulder. "Leon's a friend."

Juma's eyes flicker over to Roy. "It's safe," Roy says. "I'm not as attractive as some of the alien rockforms and canyons he photographs, but there's no accounting for taste."

"So he's a surveyor?" Nev asks.

"It's a hobby," says Pris. "Like Roy with chess, or you with cooking." That's an exaggeration--there isn't much food to experiment with in the colonies, but Nev has taken in ideas from New Shanghai and Airecitos, forged what could generously be called cuisine.

Juma still looks uneasy, but they don't bring it up again. "Thank you," Leon says later.

"It's nothing," says Roy. "If I can't bring them onside, what use am I going to be against the Blade Runners?"

They weren't going to be any use against the Blade Runners anyway, no matter whether there was one or three or five of them, Leon thinks. But he falters before he can speak. Before, he would have stated it like a fact of war, something Juma or Roy should have been able to size up from a distance, or perhaps even with the smugness of knowing better. Now, it's laden with grief, even though they're still spaceside.

It's almost too easy to go AWOL, to gather his camera and photographs and hack a status informing his colleagues that he's feeling ill and will miss a couple days of work. He's just a Nexus-6; costly, but ultimately expendable. By the time they look into his file and conclude he's not quite old enough to be deprecated, he'll be long out of reach.

The one person who does scrutinize him is Roy. "It's going to be dangerous. You said so yourself."

"I know."

"You don't--need to get your hands dirty. There's no shame in wanting to stay. Not just safe from the Blade Runners, but from yourself."

"Believe me," says Leon. "I don't want to watch you die, or Zhora, or the rest. But I _really_ don't want to hear a month later that there was an incident on Earth that got put down without me, and then get to wondering if I could have helped. Four years or forty, it doesn't matter if I'm going to have that hanging over me every day."

Roy sizes him up, his sharp eyes piercing Leon's, then grasps his hand firmly. "Welcome to the Earthlings."


End file.
